Late April 2025 I spent a few days in Greece, visiting my family. I made long walks through the old town of Thessaloniki together with my father and with an uncle. I also made long walks through the mountains around Eleft…
Clocks are not very interactive nowadays. You simply look at them and they tell you what time it is. Before they were digital things, clocks were a bit more interactive. My parents have this old wooden mantel clock and every morning they pick up a special key, put it into the slot, and wind the mechanism up. Pretty nifty. It’s ma…
Last week Robert Jan Verkade sent me an image of a clock. This was a peculiar one. It shows the time in a format I hadn’t seen before. It is a digital clock in a billboard for a company that buys and sells gold. The clock on this image shows th…
Years ago I turned an old rotary phone into a music player. I still use it, it’s a unique, and pleasant way of listening to music. I showed it to my neighbour once, and a few months ago she contacted me if I could make a custom phone for the Unread Book Club. This club was organising an exhibition around the books from the public library in Amsterdam that had never been lent out. There is a list of these books, the so called Zero List. I put this list into a phone. You can dial a …
I like things that are off. Or things that are different. I like to flip things completely, like fantasising about the back of paintings. But I also like things that are off in different ways, like this About Clock that my friend Jasper came up with. To my surprise, when I showed it during a presentation someone from the audience told me that they got a bit nauseous when they looked at it. Doing things differently, flipping things, turning things around, they o…
Yesterday there were general elections in the Netherlands. An extremist right wing party became the largest party. Almost 25% of people who voted, voted for this party. This party wants to deport all people of one certain religion, it wants to ban churches of this one single religion, it wants to ban their book. It wants to …
I was writing alternative texts for a few pictures of clocks I took last weekend in Antwerp. One of the clocks turned out to be impossible to describe correctly: the minute hand clearly points at five minutes to the hour, while the hour hand points to at least five m…
One of the additional fun things about building clocks is that people start sending links to peculiar clocks. My good friend and fellow nerd Dave Krooshof sent me a link to this video of a night clock. It’s a clock that can show you the time when it’s dark. And it can do so in environments where all you have are oil lamps instead of electricity. The 17th century was such an environment, and the clock in this vi…
When I was a kid I was bored quite often — I’m from a pre-computer and pre-smartphone generation. I’m also from a household that didn’t have a television. So being bored was part of growing up. One of the good things of having nothing to do is that you can spend a lot of time with looking at things in every detail. So as a kid I used to be an expert on the wallpaper in my bedroom, on the program of our washing machine, and I was an expert on the tiniest movements of clocks. One of the things I liked especially about…
As a kid I learned how to type on an old mechanical typewriter. One of those machines where every key was mechanically connected to a hammer. If you hit the key, the hammer would punch the paper. You had to use quite some force to make sure that the paper was hit hard enough — this is one of the reasons why some older people still hammer away on their keyboards with so much force. If you hit it hard, the letter would be bolder, if you hit it soft, the letter would be lighter, and if you didn’t hit it hard enough you’d have to type the letter again. This differe…
Recently I’ve been taking pictures of clocks. It can be real clocks, like a clock on a church or a watch on someone’s wrist. It can also be an image of a clock, like a clock as an illustration on a poster or a painting of a clock. Recently I took a picture of a drawing of a clock at the OBA, our local public library. I didn’t pay too much attent…
I’m not sure how many clocks you have to build before you can officially call yourself a clockmaker, but I’ve made yet another one, and I e…
A friend of mine told me that his ideal clock shows the correct time twice a day. We’ve all seen these clocks: a classic wrist watch that stopped ticking, or a church clock that doesn’t work anymore. Even though the clock stopped working, it still shows the correct tim…
This weekend I finally saw that fantastic Anni + Josef Albers expo in the Art Museum in Den Haag. I was amazed by the incredible woven patterns and fantastic graphic work by Anni Albers. It is just so good, I can only wish to one day be able to make work that’s inspired by her. But since the expo was so good I just had to make something base…
The Fediverse turns out to be this wonderful playground of creativity. There is this incredible place called Oulipo that doesn’t allow the use of the letter e. And last week, while surfing I found this place…
While wandering around the fascinating Fediverse I stumbled upon a wonderful community of people who communicate with each other without ever using the letter ‘e’. Or in Oulipo words: no fifth symbols if you wan…
A few years ago we went on a family holiday to Levkas in Greece. There was a swimming pool at the little resort where we stayed, and in this pool there was a ball with which we used to play. It was a sim…
There is an archive of older, and much older posts. Some about stuff that I made, some of stuff that I found worth mentioning.